“The Double” begins with Simon James’ existential dilemma. The film suggests he has always been nondescript, practically invisible: He sits on a commuter train, shot through a window pane with lights flickering off the glass, rendering him ghostly, as if he’s about to dissipate like a fog.

A man, his face obscured, approaches Simon and says, “You are in my place,” which is curious, considering there’s no one else on the train. Simon moves anyway, without protest. The rest of the film essentially explains why he reacts in this manner. The character’s arc is surreal – he’s in the process of unbeing, in the sense that a man can be so passive, he practically becomes a bystander in his own life. Director Richard Ayoade cultivates unease, filming star Jesse Eisenberg in mirrors that distort his image, or amidst strobing lights, suggesting movement as he sits still, withdrawn and dispassionate.

The plausible alternate-Earth setting seems to encourage disconnection and conformity. Simon works at a strange computer terminal in a strange cubicle at a strange office, a drone in a bureaucratic jalopy. He files reports and enters data. He lives in an unnamed but dreary city employing full-time suicide detectives. The environment features old-tech ephemera: worn-down switches, clicking knobs and battered keypads. Ayoade develops the dystopian feel with drab colors and dim fluorescent lighting, and the soundtrack features the rhythms of industrial sound - typewriter keys, machine-like whirring, the bleeps and bloops of an old computer, dial-up modem squawks.

Simon is intelligent, good at his job, but spiritually void. He dwells in a drab gray apartment with a cot and a TV and a telescope, through which he spies on his attractive and lonely co-worker Hannah (Mia Wasikowska). He lacks the confidence to engage with her beyond the professional, and instead plumbs her garbage for scraps of drawings she has torn apart, and pieces them back together. Her apartment is relatively bright and dotted with color, so there may be hope for her beyond being a cog in a machine.

The small frustrations of Simon’s life become more frequent, and they’re all linked to identity: his badge at work inexplicably expires, and the security guard never recognizes him despite their daily encounters. A few visual cues foreshadow the full-blown arrival of James Simon, his exact physical twin, but psychological opposite. James is outgoing, confident and irresponsible. James begins taking credit for Simon’s credible efforts at work, and nobody seems to notice they appear to be the exact same person. They become friends, but interest in Hannah stokes a rivalry that seems inevitable.

When “The Double” lets us marinate in its distinctive visuals, it’s provocative, occasionally fascinating. But Ayoade and Avi Korine’s screenplay – based loosely on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella of the same name – tends to discard suggestion for obviousness. The film is most effective when manipulating tone and imagery to convey Simon’s crushing sense of insignificance. But when a supervisor at work plainly calls him “unnoticeable” and a “non-person,” it needlessly underscores a feeling previously implied, as if fishing for a big laugh. Such moves tend to water down the film’s heady symbolism.

Most of Ayoade’s decisions are deliberate and studied, and “The Double” doesn’t resemble your standard dystopian drama. It does, however, often recall the bizarre surrealism of David Lynch or Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” and even overtly references Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” and David Fincher’s “Fight Club.” There are worse filmmakers to emulate, for sure. The director’s best move was employing Eisenberg as two sides of the same psychotic coin. His performance, rife with nuance and discreet comedy, is the film’s strongest element. He finds the loneliness and obsession at the character’s core, and engages us in Simon/James’ bizarre emotional journey.

John Serba is film critic and entertainment reporter for MLive and The Grand Rapids Press. Email him at jserba@mlive.com or follow him on Twitter or Facebook.